Hall of Mirrors
by Silver Pard
Summary: Happily Ever After depends upon your way of looking.
1. Cinderella

Ashes

My mother was a witch. This is not to say she was a bad person. She simply had a power, and instead of scourging herself in penance, flinging prayers to the ether to change something that couldn't be changed, she accepted and used that power. She was a fierce person my mother. She reminded me of the old tomcat who ruled the kitchen step. Indifferent. Self-possessed. Not to be trifled with. It is probably not the most flattering comparison I could make, but it is the most honest and gives you the best idea of her nature. My mother was the cat that has chosen to come in from the cold, but stays only so long as it wishes, always prepared to leave without a backward glance from people that have adored and cosseted it.

How else could I know to ask my father to give me the first hazel branch to touch his head on his way home? I would have liked dresses and jewels just like my stepsisters, of course I would, but my mother was perfectly clear with her deathbed wishes, and made quite sure I knew what to ask for.

She was a witch, my mother, and I'm one too.

So I planted the hazel branch and watched it grow to avoid my father's new wife. She was a proud woman, and brought with her two daughters, both of them pretty in a soft, decorative way. No fire in them, my mother would have said, sniffing disdainfully. My mother's element was water; she wore her troubles down or she circumvented them. Eventually, all things went the way she desired them.

I do not have my mother's will, her flow. I have fire. Too much of it, perhaps. So I did not reach an accommodation with my new stepmother. I did not make her welcome, as my father told me to do. I did not like my new sisters, for all they were pleasant enough. The trouble of being a witch, I suppose, is that you must always be suspicious of someone's motives. To be burnt is a painful way to die.

When my father died, I hardly noticed it. He was a merchant, always far from home; he was always a pale shape to my mother's energy. I did notice when the books in the library disappeared. I noticed when the fine furnishings went the way of the books. I noticed that my two sisters got new dresses (I did not care to notice the circumstances behind them, the knowledge that my stepmother went upon bended knee for them, begged and borrowed and played the widow in impoverished circumstances). I noticed that my own jewellery, inherited from my mother, started going the same way as the books, and my stepmother found me one day holding sharp scissors, the new dresses my stepsisters would never wear in tatters around me.

When friendship with my two stepsisters would have proved useful, I found I had already burned that bridge. They were good people, but loss of wealth to those who have always known security is terrifying, makes for short tempers and short patience, and besides, it was their new dresses I had quite unrepentantly reduced to rags.

During the day I belonged to the fire and the hearth; I learnt baking and fire keeping and scullery keeping, all the arts of fire that I was pleased to learn and earned me the contempt of my sisters. At night I went to my mother's tree and danced as my mother danced, I did magic as my mother did magic, and I was happy enough.

–

Of course it would not remain that way. My mother's magic was strong, and would not let it stay so. She was water, and all obstacles would be passed.

–

I was jealous, when I went to my mother's tree and asked her to let me go to the ball. I was seventeen and I wanted to dance, I wanted to know what my sisters found gratifying in the gazes of men, I wanted to know what it was to be a normal girl for once, just once.

So I wore the dress my mother provided, put on the shoes gilt with gold, tied my hair and strung it with jewels as she planned for me to. I stood and I went and I danced like fire set loose at last. I danced with the prince. There was no choice in the matter – he was the prince; how could I say no? So I danced with the prince till the stroke of midnight, hoping until the very moment the clock struck that he would let me go, let me dance with someone else on my night of freedom, let me be free. I danced and danced and I hated him in the same breath that I loved him, for my mother's magic was water and mine was fire and in something so powerful as love we must always be at odds.

When the clock struck midnight, I ran home, and I flung my dress away and cursed my mother and her magic, for I knew I would return the next night, and the next. And so I did, though every time I hoped my mother's magic would loosen its hold on him, let me be for just a few hours to dance with someone else, anyone else, whoever I wished – is it not funny, how upon being given a maid's dream I wanted it to go away?

On the third night I ran away I still held hope that this was simply an interlude in my life, just three sparkling days of magic to be looked over with fondness one day in the far future – _ah, my children, I could have been a princess if I wished_. Except that I did not wish.

But my prince is cunning and my mother strong, determined to give me a happy ending, to give me the best that could be asked for of life.

He smeared the steps with pitch, and one of the fine shoes my mother's doves gave to me left my foot and stuck there, and no amount of pulling would loosen it.

Home in the kitchen, looking into the ashes to see what future was foretold there, I saw nothing but mud.

–

When men came to my stepmother's house bearing the shoe, I waited in the scullery while my sisters panicked and hoped and surveyed their feet with an odd mix of pessimism and hope.

I knew it would not fit them. Made with magic for my foot it would always be too big or too small for any foot but mine. But I did not want to marry a prince. I had danced with him, and I had enjoyed it. But to marry the man? All my mother's power could not convince me entirely that was what I wanted. I did not want to be a princess or a queen, to be constrained and moulded and forced into being aristocracy. My mother would have been able to manage it, but I am fire, and such an existence would reduce me to ashes.

So when the younger of my two stepsisters entered my kitchen, weeping, I saw a way out. You could see it in her face, her desperation to leave, to find that happy ending. "Please, please help me," she said. I remembered her weeping into her pillow, I remembered her mute and red-faced under her sister's acid tongue, I remembered her choosing last of all gifts, her sister always choosing first. I wanted to help her, for she was the kinder of my two stepsisters, and I wanted to hurt her, for I am a vengeful person and do not forget wrongs. It occurred to me that the two things were not entirely incompatible.

"Give me your foot," I said. I did not lie and say it would not hurt.

"Hold still," I said.

"Bite down," I said.

The crunch of blade against bone was very like the crack of chicken joints.

I helped her out of the kitchen, milk-pale and her ankle bound tight. "She is faint at the thought of seeing her prince again," I told them, and watched them help her upon her horse and I hoped the prince would be fooled.

–

A manservant told me later that one of the doves in my mother's tree began to sing as they went past

(_turn and peep, turn and peep there's blood within the shoe_)

but the aide de camp, weary and near-breakdown from a futile search said flatly that one of them had to have seen the blood seeping through. I cursed my mother's magic that day, to make a shoe as clear as glass.

(_the shoe it is too small for her, the true bride waits for you_)

When my elder stepsister stepped into the kitchen, I did not need her to talk and I did not need time to be sure of my intent. I sent her out in the same state as her sister; I made them equal for the first time in their lives.

I knew already she would fail, but I am fire, and I do not care who I burn.

My mother's doves sang and sent the search party back to the house where I waited.

–

The wedding passed in a torrent of lace, dressing and undressing, absurdly extravagant, the dress so covered with jewels and the train so long I could take only mincing steps forward, the crown so heavy I could barely lift my head.

I said my vows and I wept and perhaps my prince took them for tears of joy, as the populace did, and my head spun from all the strange phrases and the echoes from the cathedral walls, the mess of cooks and tailors and maids all seeking my approval, the Queen staring at me with her coolly appraising eyes, clearly wondering what sort of princess I would make.

I wondered too. My prince did not wonder. He led me to the bridal chamber and taught me what he wished me to know.

–

"You are not permitted a knife," he said. "You are not permitted a blade, you are not permitted a sword. I prefer my fingers and toes as they are – numbering ten and attached to me. Do not mistake me for your relatives."

–

"You do not sweep, you do not build the fire, you do not cook, you do not clean. These are things servants are for."

–

"You may not leave the palace grounds without an escort," he said.

–

"You do not need to visit your mother's tree," he said. "It will be dug up and replanted on the grounds."

–

_Do this. Do not do that._

_You are queen, not a servant. You are a doll, not a person_

_I was fire, but my mother was water and now I am ashes._


	2. Sleeping Beauty

Nightmare

She was asking for it. Just lying on there on that bed, fast asleep, she was asking for it.

It was only right. After the struggle with thorns and curiosity, it was no different to seeing a cool glass of water waiting after a long run in hot weather. She wasn't even a reward. She was obligatory; she was a glass of water, not a medal.

Consent? She couldn't say 'yes', so what? She didn't say 'no', did she? Besides, she was asking for it.

To be fair, you tried to wake her. You shook her and slapped her, and flung water in her face and she didn't move an inch. She was beautiful though, and you'd lost a fine hawk in the finding of her. Maybe she smiled at you, and you took that to be a request. Maybe it was the smile that comes from pleasant dreams, far away from you and your hands inching towards her skirts, but if she didn't smile, so what? Fast asleep and too beautiful for words, she was asking for it.

Of course she didn't struggle, so she had to be willing. She just lay beneath you and endured – if she even knew what was happening to her as she slept, somewhere far away in the land of dreams. If you think about it, maybe the reason you weren't as unsettled by this as you should have been was that you'd received a similar response from many of the maids over the years, except they made little noises of pain and discomfort that have always annoyed you.

And then you went your way, whistling, back to your wife (who, quite apart from being barren and therefore useless, has never treated you with respect for your status as king or had any sympathy for the problems that entails). If you thought of her at all, it was fleeting; perhaps you even used her to illustrate some bawdy jokes – this one girl who – this fantastic looking – a fine wench with – legs from here to – breasts round and perfect as the moon. (Did you even unlace her stays? Or did you just shove her skirt above her hips and go straight to business? Don't be _offended_. Why are you acting as if what you did was some sort of communion with this poor defenceless girl stretched out on her bier? What you did was cheap and tawdry. You raped her. No two ways about it.)

And were you ashamed when you went hunting once more in the forest and the memory came to you? Why should you be? She was asking for it. You went back to the castle, and you did not know then that she was awake – that one of the infants you foisted on her had sucked mistakenly at her finger and drawn the splinter out – so what you had in mind is transparent.

You found her nursing those infants, those pale breasts you remembered so well partly obscured by the fine down of the back of a baby's head. She'd called them 'Sol' and 'Luna', Sun and Moon. Perhaps she believed a fairy or some such thing had fathered them. She was in for a rude awakening (ruder even than the one she originally had) if that was the case.

As one version of your story puts it, you developed "a great league and friendship" with her over time. Perhaps you saw it that way, but she might disagree. You preferred her asleep, quite frankly. That first time when she was awake – god, such noise over something she'd already lost!

She was the mother of your children; of course you couldn't stay away. If you never saw those children for longer than ten minutes, what of it? There's nothing odd about it; who spends hours with their children anyway? They're there to ensure you have someone to inherit the crown, and they should be kept out of sight and out of mind until they are needed.

Your wife (who was not the mother of your children, no matter how often you tried to get them by her) was a shrewd woman and quickly added two and two together. Well she had to be intelligent; she wasn't good for anything else, the barren witch.

Hence, the hideous incident with the pies and the 'eating of your own'. Were you horrified at the thought of eating your own children?

Did you spare a thought for their mother, your sleeping beauty, weeping and hysterical, her children the most precious things in her life? (All her people are a century gone, her rapist her only contact to the outside world— why do you keep protesting that term?) Or did you simply think, well I know I can father more on her?

It wasn't painful to have your first wife executed. She'd borne you no children, and she didn't seem to know you were an important, powerful man who was entitled to her respect. On the contrary, she regarded you with something resembling contempt. The looks she used to give you the morning after you'd taken one of the maids to bed, as if she were _angry_. You remember one time – it was the brunette, the noisy one, who'd screamed and cried and blubbered (she couldn't have been older than fourteen) – when you'd walked in one morning and she was sat there in the window seat, rocking the girl back and forth as if she were _comforting _her (what did she need comforting for? She was a servant, she should be grateful for the attention) and glared at you as if you were less than something she might scrape off her riding boots. How odd that your wife would not be able to rise above her jealousy of your piece on the side and see that those children were no fault of hers. But after so many years being belittled and slowly ground down for her childlessness, perhaps the wound of them was simply too great.

Your new wife is dutiful and meek. She doesn't fight you; at night she will lie there limp and accepting (this is not submission, as you think it is; it is knowing how to spare herself pain). In the dead of night, when you are fast asleep, away in dreamland where she spent so much time and was quite content to spend more, she will look at you with eyes hot with hate, but she won't fight. Her world has passed away, and now she is at your mercy in your court with nowhere to run.

But if you were to touch her children…

On the day of her birth, fairies lavished gifts upon her. Big magic, powerful magic. Blessings like that don't fade. She will always be looked out for.

Look. How beautiful your son. How charming your daughter. You are not a scrupulous man. You are a king; as far as you are concerned, everything is there for your amusement, to use and discard as your whim. They are your children after all, your possession. What is to stop you…?

Hurting them. You're getting quite adept at bruising the soul instead of the body.

Go on.

Look at them. Let your mind tumble over possibilities. Let it convince you that they're not yours anyway; anyone could have found the sleeping woman and done what you did to her. Throw off that thin veneer of civility, be the beast you were the day you saw her sleeping.

She's been beaten; she's the dog that cringes pathetically when you enter the room, that licks your hand with wretched gratefulness every time you don't raise your fist. Go on then. Convince yourself of her weakness. Look the wrong way at her children. Give her the strength she needs to put a knife in your throat.


	3. Beauty and the Beast

Faded

She wakes at night to tears soaking her pillow. Her husband stirs beside her, but it is the gentle movement of faraway dreams. She is not upset by this; she wouldn't want him to know anyway.

But the Beast, ah, the Beast would have known.

Perhaps he smelt her agitation and sorrow on the air but certainly he always knew the instant she awoke in such distress, no matter where he or she was in the castle. He would charge into her apartments with appalling lack of decorum and demand to know what was wrong. She would shriek at him and push at his broad chest and he would allow her to shove him out of her rooms, knowing it entertained her that such a powerful creature would bow to her fragility, and later they would speak of it, when she was more in control of herself.

She misses the Beast.

She knows it has ended the right way – the deserving prince restored to human form to take his human crown, the servants visible once more, the spell upon the castle broken. Who is she to deny them that? She is not a princess. She has faced no trials, fought no monsters (she fell in love with one). She is not brave or wise or beautiful or good. She was (is) simply a woman in love. She doesn't mean be ungrateful or to pine for something lost.

But she misses her Beast all the same.

She watches him all the time, to the gentle and knowing amusement of the servants and lords and ladies of the court. She looks for the Beast. She cannot see him, though she catches glimpses.

Her prince's skin is so smooth, so pale and hairless. He eats his food neatly – he doesn't scratch the porcelain or knock over glasses, his great misshapen paws too big and too unwieldy, unsuited to such delicate tasks. His hands now are slender and elegant, the nails neatly clipped. His name is Reuben. She would never dream of wandering through the halls calling for him (they have servants to tell them they are looking for each other now and the name is still strange on her lips. She never uses it and he doesn't seem to notice). His voice is soft, melodic. He wears fine clothes and they suit him – he is a blaze of gilt piping and gold buttons and ivory embroidery. From his hair to his polished boots he shines, as ephemeral and pale as sunshine on an overcast day.

She misses the Beast's brooding, his dark fur, his heavy scent. She misses leaning against him and hearing the steady strong thump of his heart, which is so different to her husband's. She places her palm against his chest at night and feels his heart through his skin instead of fur, feels it move to a faster, weaker beat.

She misses the silence of the castle. When invisible the servants had been unable to talk, and it had been a long time before the Beast spoke to her at a time other than his nightly proposals. The castle itself seemed to muffle all sound (she is beginning to forget this; one day she will wake and she will have no idea why the sound of her heart, the sound of the Beast's, had been so important). Her heels didn't click against the floor; the fires didn't crackle and hiss and her fork would never clink when it tapped against her plate. She had thought that it must have been what limbo was like. She listened to her own heart to reassure herself she was not dead or dreaming. She listened to his to know she was not alone.

The castle is all noise now, filled with cheerful voices and roaring fires and sound upon sound, no longer soft whispers among the dust.

His eyes are so gentle. She no longer recognises them. She misses the Beast's fire.

He was never violent when she knew him, he was already half-tamed, but she knew it was in him all the same – that early on in his enchantment he had roared and raged and truly been a beast, that once there had been the forest in his pelt and the flickering red gleam of fire in his eyes. All the invisibles' patient shepherding could not take that wildness from him completely. So she had been afraid to meet him that first night.

He had loved her fiercely, possessively, from the moment he saw her, the instant recognition of a male animal for an attractive female, a possible mate. She had remembered a variant of the look in his eyes, seen kindled in the eyes of boys she had grown up with and in the eyes of strangers that begged her to dance and then tried to lead her away. So she had remained afraid after the first night.

Over time that look had gentled, but she always knew that somewhere in Beast that fire had not gone out. As she had begun to know him, to slip into a comfortable routine with him, to find herself wedded to him without ceremony or ring, she had stopped fearing him. She grew to love him not in spite of that wildness, but because of it.

His love now is a weak, pale thing in comparison, and she remembers their old life with pain at its passing that she knows he does not share. She misses the silence and she misses the solitude, and she misses it being just them, no one else, and she misses his presence most of all.

Wherever she was in the castle she always knew he was there. He filled it with his presence, his spirit stretched out and ranging through haunted passageways and forgotten rooms. She could be on one side of the place and he on the other and she would still know he was in the castle, that it was his castle. As a man, she knows he is there only when she sees him.

She has taken to reading in the library more and more often. The man who was her Beast no longer has the time (the inclination?) to shadow her steps, to spend all his time and effort entertaining her. He is busy with the life of a king, parley and decree and commerce and who knew what else. He hunts with his men in the greenwood while she sits in the library and remembers days so long ago when Beast would watch her silently from somewhere in the room, when she might have abandoned her book and sat next to him and simply enjoyed being with him. She would lean towards him and they would discuss what she had been reading, and he would frown more often than not, and she would be forcibly reminded that he was a beast, a condition she was forgetting more and more often. Sometimes her husband enters the library while she is still there and she knows it only when he reaches out and touches her shoulder.

She misses the thick, coarse fur against her fingers, and she misses his heavy scent of wood smoke and pine and something deep and musky that she can no longer recall properly. When she buries her nose in a new-skinned wolf pelt and breathes deep, something in her mind stirs, whispers of the Beast, but even that fragile connection is fading.

She misses his full-throated roars and she misses his deep, gruff voice. She misses being the most important thing in his life. She misses being the only person to make him smile.

She only meant to tell him that she loved him. That was all. She hadn't said for it his salvation; she hadn't said it for the pale man that has claimed her as his wife or anything else. Her heart had simply been too full, and her fear that he would die without knowing it too great. She had never wanted this pale man, this prince, this shadow of the Beast. She had loved the Beast, been happy and content with the Beast. She had never had much thought for the future, had been too content in the present, but if she had thought of it at all she had simply imagined their lives going as they always had, just the two of them bound by friendship (love), to one day end their lives in the dark forest, their passing unknown and un-mourned save for each other. A simple life. A pleasant life. A contented life.

There are days when she stands naked in front of the mirror and traces the pale scars on her hands, her arms; the marks of his claws where he was not quite careful enough. She cherishes those marks, but her husband can't stand them. He makes love to her with his eyes closed because he cannot bear to see the jagged marks over her collarbone where he shook her once in desperate, over-protective anger and his clawed thumbs had dug in and cut her. He doesn't like seeing the scratches from times when he tried to take her arm to lead her somewhere and accidentally pierced her skin. His memory of his time as Beast is melting from him as the enchantment did and one day he will be unable to remember it at all save for the chronicle on her skin.

_This is from when he was so anxious to show me the newly cleaned ballroom that he forgot to be careful. _

She remembers it as the first time she realised just how expressive his face was; even with the fur, the fangs, the snout. He had been hopeful and eager to please her and then dismayed at his clumsiness and pained by the sight of her injury.

_That one is where I surprised him and he whirled around too fast to stop himself._

That was one of the few occasions after their comfortable routine was firmly established that she feared him. It was surprise mostly, at seeing him whirl around to face with fangs bared and his arm outstretched. In that instant she thought of bears and great heavy paws that could snap a man's spine with one swipe.

_These are from the time I was climbing the big oak tree out in the courtyard and I fell and he caught me._

She had never climbed a tree before. Now of course she is a queen; she will never again be able to wear her simple homespun dresses and hitch the skirts above her knees and climb trees. She had never climbed a tree before she became the Beast's guest because well-bred merchants' girls simply do not climb trees. It took her a long time to become comfortable in the Beast's presence, and she was unnerved by the invisibles (except they are not invisible any more and she needs to stop thinking of them that way), and it hit her all of a sudden one day as she looked at the oak that no one would judge her any more. There was nobody but the Beast, and how could he condemn her for climbing a tree?

He scolded her roundly for doing something so foolish (she has already forgotten how terrified she was when he bellowed at her) and she'd had the good grace to look ashamed until she reached her room to put salve on her bruises and the long scratches where his claws had grazed her, at which point she started laughing and been unable to stop.

There. The first time she realised she could be happy with him.

_Those pale semicircles on my feet are from that one time I tried to get him to dance with me and he kept treading on my feet._

He hadn't wanted to dance. He'd protested (quite rightly) that his physiology was hardly built for dancing. She hadn't cared, had been alight with the desire to turn the tables and entertain him for once. Her every whim was to be catered for, he said when she first came to the castle – she reminded him of this when she asked him to dance, being quite firm on the point that her whim was that _he_ should be the one to dance with her – and she wanted to repay him in some small way. They had given up after she'd yelped in pain (no longer surprise) for the fifth time. He had frowned and been endearingly earnest in his desire to be sure she was not badly injured, and she had flung her arms around his neck and giggled like a madwoman into the thick mane of fur and wished she could hold on to that moment forever.

There. The moment she knew she could love him.

_There. _

She baked him a cake once. The invisibles (but they are not invisible any more; not in the same way) had served it that night. It had looked drab and unappealing sitting in the middle of the kingly spread he served to her every night, but he had taken a slice anyway, although it crumbled between his claws and fangs and crumbs tumbled into his rich dark fur.

There. The first time she had smiled at him.

She had worked in the gardens, determined to coax flowers other than roses from them, and when she'd seen green shoots for the first time she'd been delighted and spun around to face him, laughing with exhilarated delight.

There. The first time she had laughed with him.

_Welcome Beauty, have no fear_

_You are queen and mistress here._

She is afraid. She is afraid that she is nothing more than ornament to hang on his arm and warm his bed at nights, because certainly her life now has nothing of the simple contentment of her life then. She is afraid that the love she felt for him has faded as much as his for her. She is afraid it has melted away like snow, and left nothing but bare land.

She tends to the cold space he left behind. In time, she hopes, something might grow.


	4. Puss in Boots

Master 

The Marquis is a pale, nervous man who might have once been handsome, had not constant fear and worry made their mark upon his face. His smile of greeting is awkward and strained, his attention never able to remain focussed upon his guests. The reason for his distraction sometimes shows itself. The Cat stalks into the room with a confidence Kings can only envy.

The Marquis is afraid of the Cat. Perhaps he hates it, but certainly he is afraid.

It sits on the windowsill, by the fire, at the table, and regards him with the amused, condescending look particular to the feline species. His wife laughs at his fears, but she and all the servants skirt around the Cat all the same.

It has never had a name. Just 'the Cat'. The children call it 'Puss', and the Marquis is always wondering when the Cat is going to let the other shoe (_boot_) drop. He knows it's just waiting for the right moment. It's a cat, after all.

_A name, Mistress?_ the Lady Carabas imagines it inquiring blankly, regarding her with bemused scorn in its gold eyes, the word 'Mistress' imbued with an effortless and almost undetectable mockery. _What would I need a name for? We all know perfectly well who I am. _Sometimes it deigns to approach guests, regarding them with singular contempt until the Master introduces it uneasily as 'The Marquis of Carabas.'

His guests think he is joking.

(_the Lord Marquis of Carabas is your name now, my Master. You have never been anyone else. Do remember this._)

"Puss," the Marchioness calls awkwardly, feeling ridiculous, and knowing there is no logical reason she should be so nervous. It's only a cat. It raises its head and sniffs disdainfully. She feels, as she does every time her path crosses with the Cat, a sudden empathy with mice.

There was a time when she was entranced by the Cat. It was sleek and suave then, effortlessly elegant; she had whispered shyly to her new husband that the markings on its face made her think of fairies painting those irregular, marbled patterns with slender fingers. Her husband had laughed for so long and so hard she had been worried he would choke.

It was a beautiful cat then. Perhaps it is her imagination, or the latent hysteria that coats every part of the Carabas estate, but it seems bigger. Fiercer.

(_Good people, you that mow, if you do not tell the King that all this corn belongs to my Lord Marquis of Carabas, you shall be chopped as small as herbs for the pot._)

Her father was impressed by the Cat too, she remembers. She had thought it sweet, with its neat white hindpaws (_boots? wasn't it wearing_) presenting a hare, a fine silver scaled fish, a brace of pheasants… Her father had been impressed by the Cat's servility. Any man who can get a cat to be servile, he said on the day of her wedding when she'd wept and pleaded and begged him not to give her away, is a man worthy of respect.

(_Good people, you that reap, if you do not tell the King that the meadows you mow belong to my Lord Marquis of Carabas, I will _)

She has grown to like (love, even) her husband very much, though secretly she is perhaps a little condescending to him. His good fortune is a very clever cat, after all.

(_Good people,_)

She remembers their first meal together, seeing a stranger wearing borrowed clothes staring at her across the long table, her father cheerful and unreserved, and she knew her father was considering this man as a provider for her, as a future son-in-law, a future king. He had a pleasant enough face, she remembers thinking; she also remembers noting that his hands were rough and calloused – hands of a working man, and that too had pleased her, for she was tired of pale faced fops who did nothing but talk of hunting and riding and hawking. She had thought perhaps he was a noble who was secure enough not worry about being known to do menial work, but she knew by the dinner's end that he was no more a rich noble than she was a washerwoman.

He didn't know how to deal with the cutlery, wouldn't eat until the Cat entered the room; the Cat sat at his shoulder then, purred into her suitor's ear as he stroked its ears awkwardly, nervously, with light touches – definitely not enough to engender such an enthusiastic response. She'd teased him that perhaps the Cat was whispering in his ear, for she liked him well enough (not enough to marry him, for a husband and a suitor are so often very different things) and had thought that he must prize the Cat and would be pleased at the compliment. He was frantic in response until the Cat had hissed angrily and he had instantly subsided.

(_You don't know your good fortune, Master._)

The Cat followed him faithfully during her father's tour of the palace as it would never do these days, and his comments were well timed and intelligent and insightful… and always followed a soft _mrow_ from the Cat.

He was ill at ease, clearly a little edgy around the nobles and courtiers. She watched him and noticed, smiling with wondering delight – and perhaps that was what had convinced her father most all, for he had been a kind enough man and had wanted happiness for her as well as a good match – that he sometimes imitated the Cat in all its haughty, well-bred superiority. In those moments he fitted right in.

(_I can make you rich, if I but put my mind to it._)

The Cat is not so accommodating these days. She looks at her husband sometimes, watching the Cat, and she knows, unquestionably, he is wondering when it will die and hoping fervently that it is soon.

"Don' mind tellin' you, Mistress," her maid tells her one day, with a careful sideways glance to check if the Cat is nearby, "but that _thing_ gives me the creeps."

She too is a little afraid of the Cat, though it likes her best of all, will curl beside the fire as she reads there, will even allow her – sometimes – to stroke its ears. It will purr and purr and purr; her husband claims he can hear it from the passageway, though the walls are made of stone two feet thick. It is pleased with her, and she is happy to have pleased it and forgets how her husband flinches at the sight of the Cat, forgets how the servants will actually turn around and walk out of the room they were intending to clean if they see the Cat inside, forgets how much dread she feels when the Cat leans over the cradle to peer at the baby inside… Her husband was a peasant, after all, as much as she has learnt to love him. He is only superstitious, she thinks in those moments beside the fire, the heavy thrum of the Cat's purr filling the air like distant thunder, its fur so soft against her trembling fingers.

(_Only give me a bag and fine pair of boots and you will see I am not so poor an inheritance as you think_.)

She wonders sometimes how her husband came across this estate, for he was clearly not born to it. Their first week there he was always getting lost; it took him a month to figure out the extent of his lands, and there have still been times over the years when he has admitted, shamefaced, to have gotten lost. She knows better than to ask – her marriage is filled with such gentle compromises.

She knows already, she thinks, but feels silly for even thinking it. When her eyes meet those of the Cat she is the first to look away.

(_Hush now, boy. _

_"But Cat--" _

_But nothing! Did I not tell you I would provide you with a fortune? And have I not done so? Where is your objection? Now is not the time to gain a conscience, boy._)

She knows. Of course she does. She is a princess but she is not stupid.

She wonders sometimes, irrationally – of course she's being irrational, she tells herself, but is actually very afraid she is not – if the Cat is supposed to ask for her firstborn child. He is a fine boy, Costantino, if a little prone to risk. He was as fascinated with the Cat as the Cat was with him as a chubby-faced child, and she wonders sometimes if he believes as clearly as the Cat in nine lives.

(_A gift for His Royal Highness the King from my most bountiful master, the Marquis of Carabas._)

Costantino's first word was "Cat". His second was "Puss".

She had been cooing after his cot for months, had waited so patiently for his first words, wanting to hear from her beloved child that he knew and loved her as much she loved him, trapped in a marriage with a man she did not know, wasn't sure she could ever love (she was a terrible romantic, before her marriage). To hear the word 'Cat' felt like the blow her husband has never given her. When his next word was 'Puss' she had hysterics – much to the Cat's sardonic amusement from where it watched her, daintily balanced on the wooden rail of the crib – and the servants had put her to bed, still weeping, and cosseted her for days until she felt strong enough to face her son once more and try to coax a 'Mama' from him.

She still hates the Cat for that. Just a little. She gets the feeling it knows. Her husband certainly believes it does. "Don't look at it like that," he begs her under his breath, and she can't quite keep her exasperation from her eyes when she turns to look at him. She suspects that is the only reason the Cat does not hold her hatred against her.

(_Ah, most remarkable, but can you, a being of such great – and impressive, of course you are impressive – size, go into something small… something like… a mouse?_)

She pretends she doesn't understand her husband's fear, and maybe this is why the Cat will sit in her lap, will allow her to stroke its marbled fur. It doesn't mind that she is lying; perhaps that is the very reason it likes her, for it is the master of lies.

(_I must tell you, I believe the feat impossible…_)

She wakes up in the night, sweating, her head filled with images of her children smothered in their sleep by the Cat's thick fur, a nightmare she's had often ever since Costantino's birth, for the Cat is prone to lie in the crib beside her children when they are infants. The Cat is the reason she goes to her old nurse for potions and powders to prevent conception and she remembers still how the discovery of her nurse's business had amazed and astonished her. The Cat is the reason her children are always born several years apart, for every time she waits until they are out of infancy before she breathes a sigh of relief, before she can bear to even think of carrying another. Always she expects this time to be the time the Cat tires of them and simply—

(_…such a tasty little mouse. Rest easy, little mouse, I shall make good use of your home.) _

stretches out. Rolls over. Presses its heavy furred body against their tiny rosebud mouths.

She wonders sometimes how her husband's father died, how the Cat came to be his inheritance.

(_Do not fret, my new Master,_)

She dreams of her husband, drowning while the Cat watches, for of course he cannot swim, is afraid of deep water and has always been so since the day her father met him, bathing

(_O My Lord Marquis of Carabas is drown'd!_)

in the river. The Cat fills the world in her dreams, its gleaming eyes golden and shrewd. It fills the world outside her dreams.

The Cat itself currently dozes on her bed and watches her with half-lidded eyes, relaxation personified. She reaches out with one cautious hand, waits until it gives its tacit permission before she traces the curling, rippling patterns painted across its face with fairy fingers.

(_Simply obey me, and you will have your fortune._)

Yes, she is afraid of the Cat, but it is a kindly enough master, so long as its servants remember their place.


	5. Red Riding Hood

Red

There was a girl, walking through the woods, a basket slung over one arm – take this to your grandmother, don't dawdle and stay to the path.

She knew the woods, knew the paths, knew the wolf. It did not surprise her, sitting in the shade of an oak tree to look up and meet the wolf's eyes. The wolf's smile is one she can match.

Let us play a game, said the wolf, tilting his muzzle to one side to survey her through golden eyes.

"A game," the girl said curiously, stretching out a hand and burying it in the thick ruff of fur around the wolf's neck, ignorant of the tensing of muscles beneath her pale work-roughened palm. "What sort of game?"

The wolf grinned.

(Stay to the path, daughter, or the Big Bad Wolf may gobble you up.)

This is the game, said the wolf, his voice pretending to be the same as the loyal hounds of her village, the dogs and men who watched her with devoted eyes. We shall see who reaches your grandmother's house first.

The wolf's hot breath against her cheek. Her curious hands in the wolf's long fur.

"What happens when one of us wins?" the girl asked, her head tilted to one side like a curious bird.

(stay to the path, my daughter!)

Ah, now that is the question, mused the wolf, and smiled a sharp white smile. I shall go one way, and you shall go the other, and we shall see which of us reaches there soonest.

"But what is the prize," she demanded, bold and beautiful and impetuous, and the wolf's smile widened, widened when she could not see.

The path of pins, or the path of needles, the wolf continued indifferently, stretching his long, lean body, looking over his shoulder to show his teeth at her disgruntled look.

"Needles," she said firmly.

The wolf laughed softly. Are you sure? No, my fine lady, I think the path of pins will suit you better. I shall take the path of needles. Onward, little one, let us see who will claim the prize.

"And the prize is…?" she said wryly, stubbornly determined not to lose any quarter.

The wolf's ribs, starkly visible through his fur. The wisps of her brown hair, tumbling loose from her red hood to frame a face still round with a childhood barely bidden goodbye. The scent of her, and the hunger that gnawed at the wolf. _Prey_, her scent said. _Hunter_, her eyes claim.

Run, said the wolf.

The wolf ran, gaunt and hungry. The girl sat beneath the oak awhile longer, teasing her curls round and round her slim fingers, thinking of the wolf, the wolf's eyes and grin and the promise there that she thought she could read.

The wolf reached her grandmother's door before she began to walk, the scent of the girl still in his nose.

"Open the door, grandmother," he called, the memory of the girl's voice leaving his throat, sweet and high. "'tis your granddaughter."

"Lift up the latch and walk in, my dear."

_Where are you going, my red-hooded daughter?_

_Let us play a game_

_(a game?)_

The grandmother, oh, her flesh so old and weathered, her blood so rich with years brought to a close. Yes. Another game is in order, another test to see which will win out, the scent or the sight.

"There's some meat and wine on the shelf," he tells her when she lifts up and the latch and walks in, cheeks blooming red with cold, her eyes bright with the invincibility of the young.

_The blood and the flesh is the life. _

Blood and flesh, the oldest covenant of all, ancient long before the crucified god told his followers _this is my body, this is my blood, eat, drink in remembrance of me._

The wolf's smile widens, widens, when she drinks, when she eats.

_Slut!_ hisses the cat in the shadow-smoke voice of felines as it leaps onto the windowsill. To eat the flesh and drink the blood of your own grandmother!

The wolf's smile sharpens when she doesn't hear.

_Come to bed, lie down here beside me._

The red hood slipping from her brown curls, the blood-red cloak folded neatly, to be cast upon the fire, her white pinafore and its bothersome ties flung over it, her peasant dress, rough homespun and stained going up in smoke. The wolf's gold eyes, glittering.

_Throw your clothes on the fire; you won't need them any more._

"Why, Grandma—" a hint of mockery, "what big eyes you have."

"All the better to see you with, my dear," he rasps in her grandmother's voice, playing the game, for it is still a game between them, and the smile she gives is as triumphant as his.

The gleam of her bright eyes peeking slyly out beneath the long dark lashes. The wolf's coarse fur against her pale pink skin.

_Come to bed, lie down here beside me._

"Grandma, what big ears you have."

"All the better to listen to you with, my dear."

The scent of blood and family flesh on her red, red lips. The wolf's vulpine muzzle against her neck, tongue rasping against her blood-streaked, fear-white cheek.

"Why, Grandma, what big arms you have,"

"All the better to hold you with, my dear"

Her thudding heart between her ribs, quickening with fear realised too late, and it's a shame, the wolf thinks in the corner of his hungry mind, that she should slip so late, so close.

"…what big teeth you have…"

A shudder through her skin, and he knows the response that should be given to finish the game, because her eyes have lied and he is hungry. His smile widens.

"All the better to eat you with, my dear," he says.

_Et en disant ces mots, ce méchant Loup se jetta sur le petit chaperon rouge & le mangea._

(Stay to the path, daughter)

_Let us play a game._

(What is the prize?)


	6. Diamonds and Toads

Mute

Go away. My lady is not well and will not receive visitors. Even were she, my good sir, it is far too late. Please leave before I call the guards--

_Tom?_ Tom Piper? Of course I remember you! That business with the pig, was it not? No? Seven years _is_ a long time to hide away for such a small offence.

And did you find your fortune?

Well, good luck to you. Richard? Why, he's courting Betty. You remember how he used to make little flower chains to put upon her hair; now he works hard and gives her a fine gold chain for her neck instead.

A little too young for that? Don't be silly Tom, he's sixteen now, and a happier, more generous lad you couldn't hope to meet. The villagers call him Robin, I've heard, always bobbing along… Speaking of your brothers, you won't even recognise baby Harold. _I_ certainly didn't the last time I was in the village, so what hope do you have, seven years gone? He is a very solemn child, and he has the most beautiful eyes; he will break as many hearts as you when he is grown to manhood.

Yes, I suppose that wasn't very nice of me, was it? But oh, how I've missed you Tom!

What brings you here, Tom? Let me guess. You've heard rumours abroad or wherever you were of our queen. You want to know if she's as beautiful as you've heard… no, you want to know if it's true her every word is diamonds and roses. Is it not so?

You are as bad as all the rest! Get out, get out-- My lady? My lady! What is wrong, what is the matter?

Oh.

Hush, my lady, I know nothing is going right, but all will be well in the morning. There now, don't weep; I'm here, aren't I?

Yes, I know, I've already said I will call the carpenter to fix the furniture in the morning. Yes, I'm quite sure the shift is ruined and cannot be repaired. No, he will neither notice nor care, Cara.

Oh, this is Tom, only Tom, my lady. He is from my village, and I have not seen him for years. He is really very kind; you have no reason to be afraid, my lady.

Master Puss will guard you now; won't you, Master Puss? Don't be fooled by his civilised exterior, my lady, all cats have the hearts of lions.

The door is barred; he will not enter these apartments again tonight, Cara. Tom and I will be out on the balcony; throw one of those pebbles in the jar over there if you have need of me. Do _not_ call; your lips need time to heal and if you bleed all over that new shift and stain my fine stitching I will be very angry.

…No, my lady. The fault is all his. You did nothing wrong.

* * *

I hate him I hate him I hate him!

She bled again this month. He claims that is why he beats her but everyone knows he does it for the diamonds that she produces with every cry. He beats her for the thought of all the jewels a lullaby would produce; he beats her because she cries when he orders her to undress; he beats her because she flinches when he smiles; he beats her because she won't speak.

He made her miscarry once. Oh, the royal physician said she fell upon the tower stairs, of course he did, but all we maids know the reason that poor thing came early.

…Forgive me. I should not be speaking of open secrets.

No! It is not right that he treat us all equally badly! He may treat me or Susan or Marie however he wishes; we are maids and he is King. But she is the Queen! He should not treat her as if… as if she were nothing more useful or intelligent than a hunting hound or horse, to be taken out and shown off and then put aside and left until he thinks of hunting again!

How old do you think she is?

Sixteen, seventeen? She is twenty-two, a year younger than me. Of course she is pale and small; she will hardly eat. Of course her eyes seem wide and young, she is terrified, all the time.

The King – but he was the Crown Prince then, you'll recall – married her seven years ago, not so long after you… left. She was fifteen and she looked like something taken out of the woods, all trembling and shy and ready run if the wind blew the wrong way. She wore the Queen Mother's old wedding dress, and it was very fine, covered in diamante and seed pearls, a huge sapphire at her throat.

I wept tears of selfish joy to see her. The Prince was… how shall I put this… much convinced of his place in the world and what it entitled him to, and I, being only a maid, had no right to disagree with him.

Oh hush Tom, do; "The Franks had the right idea about monarchy" indeed! Do you _want_ to hang?

She was a very quiet woman. Not so mute as she is now, but even then she was very quiet. Wasn't very hard to figure out why, of course. She always thanked me very politely when I finished arranging her hair or lacing her dress or simply reading her a book, and every time, _every time_, a diamond or an emerald or some other jewel, or a rose or a forget-me-not or some such flower would fall from her lips.

Of course it sounds like a good thing! Who wouldn't want to talk themselves rich? It is _not_ a good thing Tom. It hurts her, you know this. Jewels are cold and sharp; every time she thanked me she split her lip open and bled. Those fine jewels you are imagining saved away in my mother's house are always stained with her blood.

And the King. Of course the King didn't care. He was love itself to her the first few months, always fetching and carrying and inquiring most solicitously over her health, but even then she flinched a little when he came near. If his manner towards her in his bed was the same as his manner towards the maids I cannot blame her. It's not that he was cruel, or at least, he was not deliberately so then; it is that he didn't appear to know or believe that the woman he was with served any other purpose than for his pleasure.

He is King, after all.

We maids have never cared much for the King, but we are willing to be in the same castle as him if it means serving her.

We made up a rudimentary sort of sign language, the Queen and we maids. Like this— hold your thumb and forefinger up, there, like that. Open and close, one, two, three. _Candle_. Cover your eyes with one hand; spread your fingers a little, peep through. _Afraid_. Little-afraid, like the birds that want to feed from your hand but dare not. Cup your hands like a bowl, close to the chest, and push outwards. _Gift_.

We laughed much over our attempts to find the words in fluttering hands – the Queen did not laugh of course, she never laughs – and had much fun. Much more fun than one has any right to expect, being a Queen's maid.

It was not fun when her husband made her cry with his snide remarks about playing games and if she would only use her hands better elsewhere instead of entertaining the help. He hurt her terribly talking cruelly about witchcraft and if she kept spinning enough words with her pretty hands she'd spin a rope to swing by.

She is not a very good Queen. Oh, she is graceful on the dance floor and she is kind and good and generous and sympathetic, and those of us who serve her would die gladly for her, but she is a very poor Queen. She doesn't know the protocols, she doesn't know the right moments to speak, the right moments to be silent, she didn't know it was inappropriate to giggle when the priest is giving his blessing, she has no idea she is not supposed to talk to beggars on the street and give them gold to sooth their wretchedness.

She has been taught painfully and clearly that she does not sweep floors any more, nor cook nor clean, nor draw water from the castle well. She may sew, but her embroidery is not fair – she has grown knowing how to hem clothes and mend them, not how to embellish them. She is not allowed to talk with her hands before other people.

She only made that mistake once or twice.

Every time she made to reply with her hands to solicitous guests he slapped his hand down on hers – I always flinched when he did that, for her hands are so small and delicate and his hands are heavy, hulking things– and hissed firmly that she would use her mouth to talk and adding, _we'll speak of this later_. And of course, she would speak and the guests would gasp and stare as sapphires and emeralds and flowers fell from her lips; pearls before swine. Sometimes her lips would be so badly cut the diamonds looked like rubies.

He spoke about her disobedience later, he always did, and for all his protests he spoke a language with his hands as fluent as any of us. "What have I done?" she begged us the first time he introduced her to the words of his fists. "What did I do wrong? Why is he angry with me?" and she didn't even care that all she was doing was adding to her pain with the jewels he prized so highly.

He gave her flowers the next day, of course. She was so relieved he was no longer angry she hardly cared the flowers were the very ones that dropped from her lips the night before when he ordered her to speak, or that the fine choker of diamonds strung together in silver and gold was made from the gems she spilled telling him the story of how she was cursed – blessed, yes, of _course_ I meant blessed, what else would I mean? – with the ability to speak diamonds and roses.

And life went on, and the beatings gradually became more frequent, and she spoke less and less rather than more and more as he wanted her to do.

We help her as best we can. We all do our part, running interference, but Marie is the bravest of all; she bears her head high when walking through the village on errands, even when she is called a slut by her own father, for she is the one with more courage than any of us to put herself in the King's way when he is drunk and full of desire.

He is getting wise, and perhaps he is getting more determined.

He wants the Queen to have a baby now. He's thinking of an heir, or he's thinking of all the jewels she could make by singing a lullaby – for what mother will not sing to her own children? – and most assuredly he is not thinking of her small body and her narrow hips, no bigger than a child's. Or perhaps he is – what better way to get rid of an embarrassment of a wife? Women die in childbirth all the time. Ah, but now it is I who should not speak for fear of the trapdoor and the rope.

* * *

Come away with you? Don't be silly, Tom. How could I? Leave my mistress all alone with that brute?

Well of course she has other maids, but that is not the point. We are friends Tom. How could I leave her, how could I tear one the few meagre supports she has from her? Even for you I will not do this.

Go away now, Tom. Do not ask me again, for I might say yes, and I would have to live with the shame of that for the rest of my life.

* * *

I would have married you if you had asked. I would. But no, you were all about travel and seeing strange places, not a thought to spare for your gawky neighbour, with wild hair and skirts always torn and stained.

We used to go the witch to melt wax on a full moon, we village girls, and ask for our future occupations, for the name's of our future loves.

When I was seven the wax told me I would be a maid to a Queen. I did not know it meant I would be wretched and sad.

When I was seven the wax told me your name. I did not know that it meant that I would never keep your house or bear your children only pine hopelessly for you.

You have been gone too long. She has far more need of me than you.


	7. Six Swans

Blend

Feelings, not thoughts. Hunger, fear, cold, warmth, danger, shelter. Flight, safety, danger, survival. Ground, water, sky. These are the things the swan knows.

Thoughts more than feelings. Conscience, justice, reason, mercy, love, cruelty. These are the things the man knows.

The swan dreams. It soars on white wings to its mate, resting in the reeds; downy cygnets pipe their greeting. It is not a dream as such, or a memory as the man would know it. It is another kind of _now_ that occurs when the swan sleeps, as real to the swan's mind as anything that occurs when it is awake.

The man rests uneasily, his thoughts with his brothers, with his sister, far away. He is thinking of his sister's hands, smooth and white once more, no longer torn and callused, no longer mutilated by the harsh task that gave his brothers back their human form. He is thinking of her voice, raspy and broken after years of silence, beautiful with courage and strength beyond what any of his brothers own. He is thinking of his father, twenty years dead, destroyed by the loss of all seven of his children. He is thinking of his brothers, the wild fading from their eyes, no longer swans in body, but the heart of them wearing white feathers all the same.

One brother is now king, the years in feathers drifting from his mind like fading mist, for kingship has no need for swans anywhere outside the feast table. One brother lives deep in the forest seeking the knowledge of the oak tree, the magic to transform and keep the mind of a man. One brother guards their borders, and neighbouring kingdoms speak of a wild spirit in white kept by the Seeufer Witch (for so they call their precious sister) who attacks any attempting to enter by subterfuge. One brother hunts the witch that cursed them, walking a road with no ending. One brother sails a world that is suddenly too small, looking for freedom without wings.

The sixth brother, the sixth swan drifts, torn between two worlds.

(_Hunger. Need. Longing. Absence_.)

The swan wakes with a furious cry that the man gives voice to. The man wakes with startled movement visible only in the spreading of the swan's single broad wing.

(He misses his sister, his brothers, the castle that had been his home since he was small, he wants to go--)

(_Mate and nest, safety from predators, good feeding and lack of challengers, sensation of--_)

The walk into the forest is an exercise in will, the man's against the swan's instincts. The man desires the solitude of the trees, the swan is uneasy out of the sight, the sound, the smell of water. The swan knows the freedom of water and sky. The man knows that water brings settlements, settlements means people. Both man and swan know that people are dangerous.

(Home.)

He stayed among his siblings for a short time. He and the swan were forever at odds among them, the man craving their warmth more than anything, the swan forcing him to shrink away from their touch. Villagers would reach out to touch the shining wing at his side as if he were a talisman and their dogs would growl as he passed; the swan would panic and the man would recoil. Trapped safe inside the thick stone of the castle walls the swan had pined and the man had grown thin and wan. It was too difficult to be both among people who were whole.

(_Sky._ Castle. _Lake_. Family. _Danger._ Safety. _Heavy. Fly._ Heavy. Stay.)

They would watch the swans upon the lake far from his childhood home. Perhaps the swan hoped to see its mate, its offspring among them.

He did not know while under enchantment that he was a man wearing swan feathers. He was a swan, and knew life as a swan. His only care in the few hours as a man was that his sister was remained safe from harm, and all his acts in feathers were far away dreams of another life. Swans mate for life.

(_Absence. _Missing another piece of self.)

So they return again and again to sit by the lake and watch the swans fly in, and the man counts the cygnets among the reeds and laughs at the thought that he would even be able to tell one swan from another, one baby bird from another. The swan utters desolate calls to a pen with a scored beak, followed by seven cygnets just losing their brown plumage.

The sight of them makes something twist, makes the world tilt dangerously, and the man can't keep the swan from hissing warningly when a fox gets a little too close to the water's edge, to the swans swimming upon its surface.

(_Protect. Ensure survival. _A man's immortality is his children, and this is a bitter, bitter joke.)

The world is made of fear. Fear of men and dogs and cold weather and iced over lakes. He is afraid of rats and their cunning eyes, haunted by an old image of their hungry gaze staring back at him from amidst the shattered remnants of pale blue-green eggs. He is afraid of the trees, trapping him. He is afraid of the fox and the wolf, and he is afraid of the arrow and the sword and the spear, because the man knows them and that they mean death.

The swan fears rats and foxes and wolves, a crippled wing, a nest too close to the riverbank. The man fears everything.

(_Sky. Safety. _Trapped, lost, too dark, too heavy, too human.)

He has forgotten his name. He wonders if it was ever important.

(It tasted like ashes in his mouth. He thought if he let it go he might feel lighter, but he isn't. He's still half of one and none of the whole, and the sky is still too far away to touch.)

He divides himself into two. He is the man, but the swan is there also, and sometimes they bleed into each other, neither as separate from the other as they'd both like to be.

They watch the swans upon the lake, and neither can decide if they wish they were among them.


	8. Snow White

Cold

Snow. Blood. The raven's wing stretched out over its meal.

These are the things she is made of. Cold like snow, she enchants. Sharp like the raven's beak she tears out hearts. Blood is the river she walks through and the red of her footprints as she passes, seeking warmth.

–

They call the Queen a witch, but this is not so. She knows no more than the average hedgewitch, the balms and tinctures to sooth and heal, the poisons that bring madness or death. Obvious things any woman wise to herbs knows. The difference between her and them is two – one is that she is Queen; the other is that she has a glimmer of true power.

The Queen has a mirror. Magic, naturally. She leans over the glass and she asks it a question that will destroy her stepdaughter's life. It's not "Who is the fairest?" for the mirrors that will answer that question are either liars or broken. It is '_what will happen to my country?_'

–

When the princess is seven, a woodsman takes her out to the forest. She is pretty in a sulky, petulant way – sweetness and temperance were not qualities her mother had longed for – and dressed in samite and velvet.

The woodsman carries a sharp axe in his belt, and the Queen's empty jewellery box is hidden in his knapsack.

–

_Blood on snow. Death. Destruction. Fire. The princess's adult face, merciless. _

The Queen shrieks and recoils, and when she stops sobbing she calls for her advisors, her wizards. She tells them her vision, and they exchange glances.

There was an evil omen, the day the princess was born, the princess so beloved of her father, who caused her mother's blood to run in red rivers. Sköll finally caught the sun in his jaws and swallowed it as the princess gasped her first cry, filling her mouth with her mother's lifeblood. He regurgitated it minutes later, the heat too much for him, as it always would be until the end of the world when he would swallow at his leisure, but it was an evil omen none the less, and no child born under such a sign could be anything but cursed.

They advise the Queen to deal with her little stepdaughter in ways more permanent than locking her in a tower and letting her become the focus of rebellion or the source of rival claimants to the throne.

It takes a long time, but eventually they convince her of the righteousness of their arguments.

The Queen cares for her stepdaughter, but she remembers the face in the glass, and that is not her stepdaughter but a monster.

–

The woodsman has his trews unlaced and the princess squirming and screeching like a wildcat beneath his heavy body; one massive hand is over her face, pressing her head into the wood loam, the other trying to pry her white knees apart.

The princess has never been manhandled in such a way, the woodsman's hands heavy and rough, and in places only her nurses and bath attendants have ever touched before. Snot runs into her gasping mouth and her own screams fill her ears with their wretchedness.

A raven watches on the branch overhead and chuckles unkindly at her predicament.

–

"Bring me her heart, that I- that I know the deed is done."

_Bring me her heart, that I might look at it and comfort myself that at least it will never be broken, at least I will never know her to weep for the sake of love, that I might comfort myself that the good god takes the little children to his side._

_Bring me her heart that she might not live again. _

_Bring me her heart, that I might keep her love._

_Bring me her heart, for that is how you deal with creatures of blood._

_Bring me her heart._

–

The raven's croak woke something in her. That is what the woodsman will say. She snaps her head back to look him in the face, and the blood from her split lip and the black hair spread like shining silk make her skin look pale, paler than snow. Her eyes are so black that he will swear blind into his drink that they took over the whites of her eyes, made her look fey and terrible, made her look like one of the Shining Ones.

She tears the brooch from her dress, and jams the pin unerringly into his thigh, into the giant artery there and drags it through his flesh. When he jerks back, screaming an oath and promising to make her pay, she scrambles from beneath him and flees, stumbling, into the forest. The minute he starts after her he dislodges the brooch pin, and blood begins flow, thin and red at first, then faster and faster until it spurts, gushing and near black.

He ties it up, stitches fast and sloppy with the kit he always takes with him in case of injury when he goes woodcutting.

He takes the Queen the bloody heart of a roe deer in the fine carved jewellery box, and he swears blind it is hers, because to his mind as he hacked clumsy with anger through the doe's ribs, it was.

–

She has the heart smoked and dried, and hung among garlic bulbs on twine made of rowan. She knows no more magic than a decent hedgewitch, but the way to deal with cold creatures of blood is well known, especially among the peasantry that so often feel their presence.

–

"Who is this creature?" the dwarf jeers as she cowers in the corner of the room.

"What is this creature?" snorts another contemptuously.

"Did it eat from my plate?" demands the fifth, dark eyes suspicious in his craggy face.

"Did it drink from my cup?" the seventh says mournfully – the cups are gold, and no creature can properly appreciate gold but a dwarf.

"It broke into our house, my brothers," the third says, running a finger down the edge of his axe. "What shall we do with this trespasser?"

She flings herself forward at last, abases herself as she has seen courtiers and servants do when the temper is upon her father. She has no pride left; her gown of silk and satin is little better than rags and she has long outgrown it, her black hair like silk was shorn close to her scalp with shears when she discovered little creatures crawling there. She pleads for her life and offers whatever she can think of that might make them consider it.

–

The Queen spends long hours in the nursery that was the princess's. She touches the tiny dresses of richly dyed silk and even more expensive lace, packed neat with sprigs of pine to keep their scent fresh. She strokes the faded dapple-grey flanks of the rocking horse, weeps into its horsehair mane. She kisses the heart hanging among the garlic; weeps that she never meant to harm her, never, only –

_Snow on blood. Death. Destruction. A figure dancing and shrieking in red-hot shoes. The princess's adult face, cruel, pitiless. _

Only she is Queen. Her country comes before all else. Duty before heart; that is law among warriors that have no code at all.

_The princess's face, streaked with tears._

But her nights are sweet and dreamless, her conscience clear. These things, her advisors have convinced her, are sometimes the necessary price that must be paid.

–

She cooks and cleans and sweeps. She washes dishes, learns to stitch and weave and darn. She sharpens knives, listens when the dwarves are drunk and rowdy and crow of glory days cracking skulls and splitting bodies in two with a good blow, filters the gold from the dross, and teaches herself to use them.

She learns to judge the quality of gold and silver with her teeth and her nails. She learns how to tell a jewel from a pretty piece of glass. She learns that stone has a scent, and dwarves can see in the dark better than in the day, when the light is too bright for them.

She goes hunting during the day, when the dwarves are deep in the earth, searching for gold. The meat she cooks is not always a woodland creature.

She dreams of blood as she stitches heavy leather into coats of mail. She dreams of ice as she sharpens her knives and sticks them into her boots and her belt, a tiny one in her raggedly cut hair. She dreams of carrion birds quarrelling over a vast field of dead soldiers as she cooks flesh that belongs to neither fish nor bird nor any four-legged thing.

She dreams of being a child again, swinging her father's hand as he leads her round the vast palace gardens, and she wakes with her lip bitten through and her eyes black with hate and her heart filled with ice.

–

The market folk grow restless, start demanding action from the armed patrollers when more and more of them go through the forest and don't reach the other side. They demand that the soldiers protect their country and their people.

The soldiers speak among themselves of monsters, of dead women that walk through the forests and entice their friends away into the trees. They talk of corpses beheaded or impaled.

The Queen touches the heart among the garlic and walks to her mirror.

–

The first attempt is a comb of such fine work she cannot resist it, knowing the dwarves would enjoy looking at it, derisively comparing its workmanship to their own. Her scalp bleeds profusely when they remove it.

She knows better than to try on a corset – but it's been so long since she had fine clothes, a very long time, and she can no longer remember the way her stepmother complained and fanned herself as her servants laced her tight. Then again, she doesn't remember her stepmother laughing at how she would imitate her wheezing gasps as she sat watching on the bed, or the way she would lean down and rub her cheek against hers, leaving fine powder the colour of peaches on her white face.

The dwarves cut the laces and fan her until her breathing is deep and steady and tell her to stop being such a witless fool. She has proven countless times that she is not brainless, whatever her heritage might be. Why does she persist in trying to prove the opposite?

Deep in her ice-bitten heart she thinks the answer might be that she _wants_ to die, she wants her stepmother's assassins to succeed, she is so sick of being hunted.

The apple – the old woman who dropped her basket had been eating this one before she ran away; the flesh is white and oozing where she has bitten. She bites into the unbitten half, tastes the bitterness of nightshade in an instant, and is choking when the dwarves arrive home early, already half-knowing what they'd find. They force-feed her a potent emetic, and she vomits until there is nothing left to bring up but blood-streaked bile.

A man she vaguely remembers turns up two weeks after the failed attempt with the apple, and she is busy slaughtering a fat merchant with a purse full of gold when he begins muttering under his breath, or she would recognise the intent in his voice as the beginnings of a casting, or that the words he utters aren't in a language used by any but scholars of the arcane, and she would be throwing her knives and running with the wind.

It is too late, and the curses she spits as she turns are stopped in her throat as he turns her to crystal.

–

It has been nine years, and the princess would be sixteen and probably betrothed, if not married. The Queen sits in the unchanged nursery, and her hands rest neatly folded upon her belly as if the princess were her child and she can still feel her kicking within her empty womb.

Her dreams are uneasy now, filled with ever-present death, and she dare not look into the mirror.

The wizard who first told her of the evil omen the princess was born under gave her the news a few hours ago. The girl, her stepdaughter, the only daughter she will have, is dead.

She is not weeping. She gave all her tears long ago.

The wind is sharp, and howls like a wolf, and she remembers an old legend that unhappy souls become the wind of winter nights, screaming rage and grief. "Yelena," she whispers, and she hopes the name so long unspoken will help guide her lost girl to some form of peace.

–

He is twenty-four, breeding shows in his nervous disposition and his hawk-nosed sharp-boned face, and his smile is ugly with expectation.

The heart of her is frozen, and long ago she discovered that the only thing that warmed it was the spilling of blood, and the presumption of this man for her gratitude astounds and amuses her, but only distantly, for the ice is thick and he is nothing more than a vague flickering light on the edge of her consciousness, if that.

What kind of man desires a corpse for a bride?

A prince – because only a prince could afford a wizard of high enough calibre to reverse the spell on her. A prince, but what does she care for princes? She was a princess of far superior breeding than he.

He is infatuated. He is weak. He does not taste blood in his mouth every second of the day, his heart is too fickle to become hard as diamond. He is pathetic, weak prey stumbling along with an arrow in his side, the shock stopping him from realising he's about to fall to his knees and die.

Good.

She does what she does best, and plays him like the piano her stepmother kept in her quarters. In a matter of weeks, he will give her anything. Everything. And then – well, a man is a man. Nothing more, whether he know himself as prince or pauper.

It is easy enough to kill a man, she knows. A sharp dagger in the right place, the veins and arteries thrumming heavy with life. Remove the head. Stab the heart. Gouge out the eyes, break the legs, make sure they can't be a threat again and dispatch them at leisure. No need for poisons, no need for false gentility. There is honesty in the way she kills, with a sword and a smile. She can take meagre pride in that at least.

Like he plans to use her, she will use him. He will give her his kingdom, his army, his power.

She is so sick of being hunted. She is blood and snow and carrion bird and far, far stronger than that.

–

"Yelena," the Queen says when they arrive, she with bloodstained sword in her hand, he wide-eyed and sickly with disgust. Screams fill the halls, and the stone floors are slick with blood, and the scent of smoke is thick in the air.

"Yelena," she repeats as her stepdaughter – beautiful in the ragged way of the Shining Ones, deadly more than anything else – walks up to her and kisses her cheek with her cold lips. _Hello. Goodbye_.

"You're invited to the wedding," she says, tone distantly polite, as if no battles had been fought for this moment, as if the palace were not burning about their ears.

The Queen laughs because there is really no other thing to do. Everything she has seen in the mirror as come true, save one last thing.

–

When the wedding is over, the corpse is treated with the respect worthy of a queen, though the iron is burned into the soles of her feet, into the very bones, and will never be removed.

(This is for the memory of Yelena, for the little girl who lacked for nothing, who was so _happy_ the woman named Shrike for her habit of impaling her prey cannot bear even the vaguest of memories that have managed to survive her dedicated attempts at obliteration.)

The princess vanishes three days into the honey-month, a widow with nothing more than what she can carry (but she can carry a great deal, knowing the very specific alterations required for clothing to carry and conceal as much gold as possible).

She is blood and snow and raven, and happily ever after was no part of her mother's wish.


	9. Mr Fox

Bold

Do you know, my love, that your name means 'fox' up north? Mr Tod, Mr Fox. Is it not curious? Where is it that you hail from again, my love?

_From the fair __county__ of __Yorkshire__, where the hills are green and the sky oft grey. _

Then 'tis funny you did not know it.

_Ah, but I lived for many a year in the Smoke, and have lost all of my home county's greenness and broad tongue. It has been a long time since a maiden knew to call me Mr Fox._

But I know it now.

_Indeed. And soon will you call yourself Mrs Fox? Shall we rear a litter, my love, a yowling howling brood? Shall we dance in pale moonlight and you watch as I fight all comers for the favour of your smile?_

I would not have them. Why, how could they hope to compare to the greenness of your eyes, the fine red of your hair – russet, my love, like autumn leaves.

_But they, poor pups, would think you wasted upon such as I. For you are young, and the sun is in your smile, and next to you I stand pale and faded beside your skin the colour of peaches, your hair the bright yellow of ripened wheat and your lips as small and red and sweet as a wild strawberry. There is grey among my own locks of red–_

Distinguished, my lord, it makes you look distinguished, those streaks of silver, and your face is as sharp and fine as ever.

_–and surely one day you will wonder why you ever married me, and look at those circling youngsters with their open mouths, and think of bestowing your favour there._

Never! Such thoughts do not suit you, my dearest. For are you not my one true love? Are not our hearts bound tight, tighter than all the weavings of Fate?

_Ah, I wish that I could tempt you to my house. There are such sights I would show you. —Why, are you blushing?_

No!

_There are no roses but the bloom in your cheeks, my love. You blush, I say, without the need for the paints and powders so favoured among your kind. _

And what do you mean by that?

_Only that there is many a young girl lost already to their cosmetics, trying to entrance and ensnare when they would be better suited to show their faces as they are. Some of them, my dear, look as if they have painted themselves for war, and others look merely absurd. They have no need for such frippery; never is a woman more beautiful than in the first flush of youth. I don't understand why they feel the need to conceal it._

But you are not a woman, my love.

_And god forbid that should be so._

Yes indeed, or I should be an old maid. We must learn young to conceal the blemishes of our skin, the imperfections of our body, for how else would we know what to do when the first flush of youth leaves us bereft?

_I will love you when the stars fall out of the sky and not before. When your flaxen hair is grey, I will love you still, and when your face is seamed and wrinkled like a wizened apple, I will love you, and when your body is shrunken and old, when your breasts are no longer firm and sag upon your chest, when your belly is soft and slack and your eyes are no longer that bright shade of cornflower blue, I will love you. Though of course, I feel I must add, I hope you will let me love you before that age also._

You are teasing. I do not like it.

_I mean it most sincerely, I assure you._

Ah, I am the luckiest woman alive, I think.

_Nay, I am the luckiest man. Soon I will have you all to myself, and you will be mine. Is a ring enough, do you think, to show this? There are those that will ignore such a little thing. Perhaps one night I should nip where I should kiss, and write my ownership in purple upon that long white throat where none will mistake it._

You silly man, as if I would even look upon another when I have you. I should be the one marking you, my dear one, for there are many more women who would make light of a ring and think to steal you from me than the other way round.

_Lies, my dear, but pretty lies. Were you not Lady Mary of the hundred suitors, and I merely one of them?_

Ah, but you were the bravest and most gallant of them.

_For that – a kiss. A good price, I think._

Try again, my dear one; that was not sufficient.

_Again, you say? That would not be wise, for how would I ever bring myself to stop?_

Did I say aught about stopping?

_Wicked woman, how you tempt me so. No, Mrs Fox, that will have to wait till we walk together down the white road, the long chalk road, to my house where you and I shall be man and wife. —Are you weeping, my love?_

'Tis nothing, nothing. I am only so happy.

_Soon, my love, we shall dance together, the first dance of the rest of our lives, and you shall be my wife and I shall be your husband. I will wake to the smell of your perfume every morn and I will think of what a lucky man I am, and I will sacrifice time and pretty pieces of expensive jewellery to you in the forlorn hope that you will never turn your face from me._

Ah, what beautiful lies you tell.

_Lies? I speak only the truth._

You will grow bored with me. When I swell with child you will look away to women slim and still beautiful, and I will grow old waiting for you to come at night, and you will forget all you loved in me and look for another.

_It is not so and god forbid it should ever be so. Have I not said already that I will love you 'til I am in my grave, 'til the sun crashes into the sea and the stars go out? The curve of your belly I will worship, I will rest my head there to feel my child tumbling beneath your skin. For me there will be no other woman, I will never look at another girl again – unless we have a daughter; do you think we will have a daughter, a little girl I may snarl and roar at suitors for? I should terrify them so badly they would never dare to look at her without permission._

And a son?

_Why then, I shall teach him to hunt -- Do not your family hunt, my dearest?_

Foxes, yes. Do you not? I had thought it every country gentleman's pursuit.

_No, I think not. All those hounds for one fox? It is the picture of cruelty, and it is pointless cruelty at that, for what is gained but a scrap of bloody fox fur? It does not keep them out of the henhouses. No, I think I shall not teach our son that. But I shall teach him how to make his own home, and I will hope he will be as lucky as I some day. But we shall have both sons and daughters, for are we not going to have a litter, fill my house with our brood, to yell and tumble and fill the empty rooms with noise?_

Mrs Tod; it has a nice sound. Mrs Mary Tod, wife and mother.

_A very nice sound indeed. Smile, my love, for your lips are best when they are smiling._

Ah, but they are better still when they are kissing.

_I cannot deny that. Ah, mother of all my children to be, come let me hold you._

* * *

_How pale you are, my dear, on this, the happiest of mornings._

Yes… yes I… I had a bad dream.

_A dream? Well, dreams go by contraries. But tell us your dream, and your sweet voice will make the hours pass like lightning 'til the hour we are joined. _

I dreamed… I… oh, you do not want to hear it; it was a foolish, terrible dream.

_But it preys upon your mind, my dear one. Surely it is better that you share it. Is that not what they say about troubles? And the guests themselves, poor lot, are out of stories-_

"'Tis not so! Got stories to last till Doomsday, we 'ave!"

_Ah, but are you sharing them? Nay, sit down, you are already too in your cups, sir, to tell a good tale on this, my wedding day. Go ahead, my love, tell us your dream._

I dreamed… I dreamed that last night I decided to follow the white road, the long chalk road to your house. I lost my way several times, but eventually I found it, the house that you and I would share together.

_And was it to your liking? I sincerely hope it was, though if it was not of course we may find a house elsewhere._

Oh, your house is very fine, with its high walls and fine garden. Though it is perhaps a little grim, a little gloomy.

_That is no matter; your presence will brighten it immeasurably._

And I dreamed that upon its gate was written 'Be bold, be bold.'

_Ah, but it is not so._

And so I took courage – for I must confess, I was rather more concerned than I felt I should be – and went forward into the empty courtyard, and above the door I saw 'Be bold, be bold, but not too bold.'

_God forbid._

Your door was open – how wondrous foolish of you – and so I walked in, expecting you home at any moment, and I stood in the great hall waiting to greet you with kisses sweet.

_…it is not so, it was not so, and god forbid it should be so. Perhaps a different tale, my sweet, my turtledove?_

And I saw in your hall a plinth, and upon it was carved 'Be bold, be bold, but not too bold, lest your heart's blood run cold.'

_It is not so, nor 'twas not so, but indeed god forbid it should be so._

I… and now my nightmare begins Mr Tod –

_Mr Tod? Are we not betrothed, are we not in each other's heart? You are being terribly formal, my love. Surely the guests mind not if you address me as is your right._

For you know my curiosity, it is the type that kills cats, and so I could not await you in the hall, and I went to look upon your fine rooms to see – to see perhaps where a nursery might be put, or to speculate perhaps, on where I might entertain guests. I opened a door in your east wing – but I cannot remember which – and I saw that it was filled with bodies, with skeletons and corpses, hacked limbs and sightless eyes, and there was a girl there, a girl with a face like mine…

"Heaven defend us from such dark dreams! Can such a thing be true?"

_It is not so, it was not so, and god forbid it should be so, my father-in-law! What a terrible nightmare you have had, my dearest. Another story, a lighter one! Perhaps a song should be played, one light and airy that will make us tap our feet and forget such dark fancies?_

And I dreamed, that as I stood there with my hand upon my mouth, that I heard a scream, and I ran out and down the hall, past all your fine rooms until I stood on the wide balcony above the hall, where I saw you drag a woman in by her long hair, her long dark hair. She screamed like a banshee, and you cursed her and snarled, and I saw- I saw you raise your sword and slit her throat from ear to ear, and I closed my eyes and prayed as I listened to her gurgling, sighing scream—

_In your dream, in your nightmare._

Yes, in my dream, in my nightmare. You hacked and sliced and stabbed and wept bitter tears of fury, carving her body to pieces--

_She- it was not so._

And in your fury you dragged her away without realising you had left her hand behind on the bloody marble floor, her poor pale hand with its diamond ring--

_It is not so! It was not so! And god forbid it should be so! I--_

Stop saying that! It is so and it was so, for I have her hand to show, Mr Tod! You see?

_I see perfectly clear. You condemn me to death._

Monster, monster, it is deserved!

_You do not understand! _

What is there to understand, you fox, you-!

_Your lips tremble, there are tears upon your lashes, your body shakes as I grip your arms, you are lying, my love. Only buy me time to run!_

Would you have treated me thus, would you have killed and feasted upon me?

_Never! A man might kill his wife by degrees but a fox does not harm his mate. I swear it, I swear it! My love, do not let them drag me from you, do not let them kill me!_

It is too late. The cudgels have already broken your bones; I heard the crack as my father brought his down upon your shoulder, my brother upon your leg; one of the guests has struck your ribs and the others circle, for all are honest foxhunting men. The hounds have been called for; I could not stop them now if I wanted to. You do not hunt foxes; you do not know the red-eyed bloodlust that comes upon hunting men when it comes to a blooding.

How you shriek, how you scream, oh please, oh please, stop.

Oh, oh, please, please stop screaming.

* * *

**_Mama? Mama, will you tell me about papa?_**

Papa is gone.

**_That is not what I meant._**

I know it is not.

**_Mama, why is my hair red instead of yellow like yours?_**

Your papa had red hair.

**_And my eyes?_**

Yes, your eyes are his too.

**_Is that why you don't like to look at me? Mama?_**

Aye, it is why I cannot look at you. You are the image of your father; it is a pang to see him so faithfully recreated.

**_Oh. I thought you might not like me._**

But I love you. I love you more than anything. Now remember my sweet boy that if you are lost the white road will lead you back home.

**_Yes, mama. "A fox went out on a shiny night, and he begged for the moon to give him light, for he'd many miles to go that night before he'd reach his den-O. Den-O! Den-O! For he'd many miles to go that night before he'd reach his den-O!"_**

**_Mama? Don't cry mama. Did you know our name means fox in Scotland?_**

* * *

A/N: Mr Fox is an English tale of the same type as Bluebeard. It was first written down in 1821 as an explanatory note for Benedict's speech in "Much Ado about Nothing," Act i., Scene 1--. "Like the old tale, my Lord: it is not so, nor 'twas not so; but indeed, God forbid it should be so!"


	10. Hansel and Gretel

Witch

"_They mean to kill us."_

_Hansel is younger than his sister and this conclusion horrifies him._

_Gretel moves her dark eyes to his pinched face, the tracery of fine blue veins in his milk pale skin, stretched tight over his bones. "Of course they do," she whispers._

"_Don't you understand?" he demands with hysterical energy that she would tell him not to waste if she herself had the strength. "Papa, mama, they mean to kill us!"_

_Gretel says nothing._

_He shivers. "Don't worry though," he says, crawling into bed beside her to huddle close and share their meagre body heat so that their parents do not wake tomorrow to the realisation that there is no need for murder. "I have an idea."_

_Hansel is bright and clever; Gretel has known always that he is the apple of their parents' eyes, that were it not for the extremes of starvation it would be her alone being led into the forest the next morning. She is too like their mother, who is bitter about something she lost or was not strong enough to keep._

"_Just let them try," Hansel promises fiercely. "Just let them try!"_

—

There is power in blood. There is power in the way it ebbs and flows within a woman to the call of the moon. There is power in sacrificing an animal, in drawing a knife across the throat and watching the blood splash like a spring. Runes written in blood are stronger than any other. And of all the things that linger, blood will remain longest of all.

Understand, I have no time for good and evil. I am older than the forest that surrounds me; in my time things that were good have become scorned and things that were once forbidden have become the norm. It matters not to me if my deeds are what another would call evil. If witches cared for what people thought of them they would never become witches.

So there is power in blood. This is the first truth.

The second is that there are some sacrifices that are better than others.

—

_Witch_.

The word haunts you.

You are thirty-nine now, a mother, a grandmother.

The whispers have increased as you age without aging, and it is true that the wrinkles and hollows of your face are created by the artful use of pastes and powders. It is true that you take care to hide your hands in your apron, or busy them with minor tasks if you are surprised. It is true that you dye your hair to hide the fact that it has never gone grey. If you manage to reach twice your current age your eyes will always be as sharp and black as they are now.

So they whisper. Just the wives, now, merely gossip, nothing more. For now the comments are merely that you are young for your age, and that your hands have remained free from rheumatism and your eyes are still sharp enough to know a pigeon from a hawk in flight from a long distance.

One day soon the words will twist in their mouths, become whispers of events so long ago when you were a girl, and stumbled free of the forest your brother's hand clasped in your own and burning tears in your eyes. The words will twist, and wistful remarks on your youth will become scarcely hidden barbs about how you don't seem to age as they do.

The words will twist, and one will be repeated above all.

—

_The white pebbles gleam like silver in the light. Hansel does not question this._

_He smiles bright with delight, his fair hair moon-bleached to the colour of bones. "Look sister," he says, pointing out their path of silver stone. "See how they shine! We will be home before dawn."_

_Ah, and what will happen then, Gretel thinks. They will try again and again until they succeed. But she wishes the pebbles to shine bright anyway, because Hansel must see this. Hansel must understand what she has kept from him._

—

Of all the animals, man is the greatest. So man's blood has more potency than any other. And innocents, theirs is best of all.

See my altar of bones? See how very small they are? My child's is among them.

—

They will talk of your potions and your poultices. They will talk about how you can read and write, an unnecessary skill that's above your station, and they will speculate on where you learned such a pretentious thing. They will talk of how you saved Margery Little's baby (and they will talk about how you failed to save Susan and her child, though you tried your hardest). Oh, they will talk.

_Witch._

You will pretend you can bear their taunts, but you will keep in mind the fate of many women before you, who were wise in the ways you are wise, and yet stayed as the people they helped turned against them.

You will think of the forest, and the cottage there waiting for a new owner.

—

_Twice they follow the stones back home. Twice more they are brought back to woods and left to die._

"_Why?" Hansel demands, eyes desperate and wild. The bread is not where he scattered it, their path obliterated by birds as hungry as they._

"_Better they live to have other children than we live to starve without a means to provide for ourselves," Gretel explains._

_He does not hear her. He kicks the nearest tree with fury, and then, staring blindly, begins to weep._

—

Don't look so horrified. I chose my life over my newborn son's, is that so terrible? Do you not know how many women die in childbirth? Of fever, of blood loss, of a thousand different complications, all to bring forth one more squalling brat that has a very, very slim chance of reaching even childhood, let alone become an adult.

It was sheer practicality, my girl. Your parents understood that, else they'd not have tried to kill you. They merely exchanged the food you could eat into life for them; I exchanged a burden that would have died anyway for enough power to save myself.

I reasoned, since most of our kind grow into our power with the coming of the blood, surely an innocent babe's spilled on a moon-full night must have even more.

And I was right.

—

Gingerbread walls and sugar icing panes and chocolate shingles, mortared with caramel and glazed with honey.

Such an impractical thing to make your home, a pointless expenditure of power, and in truth you were not surprised when you woke with a heavy head the next day to find that the walls were ancient stone and the roof merely thatch. Once the mouse has been caught, there is no need to keep baiting the trap.

You remember that Hansel was in the cage but you were free, and you stared at the witch with your blank eyes and waited.

—

_Hansel does not like the way the witch looks at his sister. _

_Gretel sweeps and cooks and cleans and does not talk. He hears the witch talking to her and hears her replying, and long hours pass where she is not sweeping, cooking or cleaning, when she talks to the witch. _

_He does not like the way she is changing before his eyes, the way her hair so neat and tightly bound in its child braids has become wild and tangled and suits her, the way her cheeks, so hollowed and stark, are filling with flesh that makes her look like a child well cared for, a child that someone loves, when there is no one to care for her but the witch._

_Hansel is afraid. He knows the witch desires to eat him, but that is not what he is afraid of. He is afraid of the way the witch looks at his sister. More than that, he is afraid of how his sister looks at the witch._

—

I knew what you were the moment I saw your eyes. Our kind, we all have the same eyes. Red like rubies, red like the blood we take power from. Yours are dark now, but they have the sheen to them that proves you one of us. When you have lived long and overcome your squeamishness to sacrifice as I do, your eyes will be as red as mine.

Squeamish, yes that's what you are, my finicky lass. One child every three years and you are equal to the greatest of those men with their staffs and old Latin (as if a dead language is more potent than a living one, I ask you). Where they got that power in the first place I'd like to know.

And of course, you must take care never to reveal so. Men do not like to be usurped. Fah, as if they were never infants bawling upon their mother's teat. Why we even bother bringing them forth I'll never know, unless it is the acceptable risk of creating daughters.

You'll understand one day, the way I look at this world. It's in your blood, after all.

—

The witch taught you to read, write and figure. You taught such skills to Hansel when you escaped, though he was a little put off by your own aptitude. And really, what use was the ability to him? He would be a woodsman like your father, what good was it that he should be capable of writing his own name instead of merely placing a cross?

The witch taught you moon cycles and old legends and herbs, and spoke magic and power. And slowly, the longer you listened and the more you fell into the orderly pattern of her life, you grew to like her, and respect her, and even sought her out, instead of trying to avoid her.

You knew she was lulling you. You knew better than to believe she could not tell the difference between dry bone and soft finger. You knew she was merely waiting until the day you would accept what you were and could become under her tutelage, the day you would say goodbye to all you had been when you slaughtered Hansel together.

But you let yourself be lulled. The witch did not believe you were useless for nothing but marriage and babies. The witch thought more of you than your brother with his fair hair and bright blue eyes – you with your scrawny body and scabbed knees, with your pale yellow hair that had to be scraped tight back and your black eyes with their witch sheen.

So your brother was in a cage; he had always been your parents' favourite. Surely it was time he understood cruelty a little? Surely it was time he understood that not everyone would love him for his bright smile and his baby blue eyes.

But you did not wish him dead. Never that.

—

_Hansel knows today is the day. His deception has been uncovered, the witch seizing his plump wrist rather than the proffered bone._

_He looks to his sister, but she is grim and silent and her eyes are deep and black where she stands a step behind the witch, watching at her shoulder like a wild-haired imp the witch has called to be her familiar. Suddenly he does not know her. _

"_Prepare the oven," the witch says._

"_Sister! Sister!"_

_Gretel looks, and for one moment, one stolen heartbeat of his life, her eyes are blood-covered, as red as the dawn on the morning their parents led them away for the third time._

_Gretel looks, and takes a deep breath._

—

I have let myself age; I have grown weary of the constant chatter of people. So I rest here, and every two years or so I turn my house into the confection you saw the day your brother and you passed by. It brings children, it brings the blood I require.

Of course, it is not the best solution. It has been eight years since a child passed this way, eight years until you and your brother. My powers have waned with the effort of making my cottage into gingerbread every one of those years with no reward, but it is no matter. With your brother I will recover them, recover them and teach you all that you might be.

—

You move into the cottage. Your neighbours have grown restless; the whispers that run from mouth to mouth have acquired that word you so hate. So you move into the cottage and prove them right.

You think briefly of your brother, diligently pursuing the truth in the wine. You think briefly of your son, plying magic tricks before the king. You think briefly of your daughter, her new baby on her hip. You think briefly of the row of little graves that belong to you, your infants that never saw their first birthday.

Well, a woman knows when she marries that she must leave her life behind. You are only repeating a pattern you have already walked once before.

It takes a week to clean the house from top to bottom, a full day for you to scrape the oven clean. You take down Grandmother's books, and you begin to read.

—

"_I don't know how to prepare the oven," Gretel says, soft and timid as she has never been. "You haven't taught me that yet."_

_The witch sighs with irritation and pushes her out of the way._

_Hansel sees his sister's glance, and nods. Without thought, she shoves the old woman in._

_They run from the cottage to the sound of her screams, Gretel blinded by tears, Hansel weak-kneed with relief._

_Hansel looks at his sister, red-eyed with weeping, and hugs her tight, thinking she is grieved for killing someone, even a witch. Now that the witch is dead, Gretel will be Gretel again. All the poison the witch whispered in her ears will fade away. They'll run home, and their parents will greet them happily for the gold Gretel knew the witch kept in locked strongboxes, and everything will be well again. Everything will be fine. _


	11. Rumpelstiltskin

A/N: Of course. _Of course _I update the one fic nobody is waiting for. Except maybe one, so - this chapter/story is for Charlie's Dragon.

...Well, this is very different to the first attempt I made at Rumpelstiltskin.

* * *

Name

You weep and weep, your tears and sorrows endless, for self-pity segues into fear and fear into despair.

You spin.

The straw breaks.

The straw breaks.

The straw breaks.

What holds together cannot be twisted around a spindle.

You choke on dust, on straw, on helplessness. You are going to die.

"Why do you weep," someone says.

You open your eyes, blurry with tears, meet the strangest, brightest eyes you have ever seen. You could not describe their owner if you tried, though you see him so clear he turns the world into a half finished painting. (Is he supposed to be funny? Can you laugh? You don't feel like laughing.)

"The king is going to kill me," you say, simple with self-pity.

"Such a pretty thing, you would think a man would not waste such beauty."

"He wants gold more than he wants me," you say. You do not have the words for what this means to you; you do not know what to be more frightened of - death or the nameless look you do not comprehend. "He wants me to spin all this straw into gold, and it is impossible!"

Words crowd on your tongue, explanations such as: _he has old blood, shining blood, somewhere far back, and diluted as it is, he thinks he can recognise something of it about me; he remembers that a pouch full of gold can be made from leaves, but not that they are leaves again the next morn_. He looks at you and you forget them.

"What is your name, pretty thing?"

"E-Elise," you whisper. (Foolish girl, every tale tells you names are power.)

"Elise? Elise. I do not think it suits you. You need more strength from a name than that. Cease your weeping, my dear, the task before you is not so much."

"You can do it? You can spin straw into gold?" Your fingers itch, bloody with splintered straw.

"I can," he says, smiling, twisting your bane into odd shapes between his long fingers.

"I don't believe you," you say. Your voice trembles (with hope, with despair?) "You're lying."

"I never lie. I always tell the truth. One of those things is true."

Your eyes track his hands, his fine dextrous hands, watch the straw in them gleam gold in certain light. "He will kill me if there is no gold in the morning. I would give anything to live," you whisper.

"Anything?" He says, smiles. "My sweet, foolish girl, be careful of your words."

(Too late. In this moment you fear him more than any king.)

"Give me your locket (_give me your favour_) and I will spin gold from straw for you."

Your knees go weak with relief (is that all, is that it, all he wants?). You unclasp the locket, a gift from your father, back in better days, and give it to him.

(You are tied to him now - or he to you - as surely as if you'd eaten fruit from his hand.)

He touches it hungrily, as if it is worth a roomful of gold (when he hangs it around his neck you forget your father's face, your still living love for him that has survived all his boasting and all the trouble and pain he has brought upon you).

The wheel spins and spins and the thread gleams gold.

* * *

You curse the king and again you examine the room for an escape, your soft spinner's hands rendered bloody by stone, by straw.

Then you sit, and you wait, until you hear him, your name like cream on his tongue, "Elise, my Elise, why the tears?"

You say, red-eyed, face wet, voice shaking with fury and helplessness: "When will it be enough?"

He says, "Elise, innocent Elise, a man's heart is finite, greed overflows. It will never be enough."

You ask: "What shall I do?"

"Give me your ring (_give me your favour_) my sweet, sever your ties to your past and give the threads to me, and I will spin and weave and make you a future of glittering gold."

(You forget to ask yourself or him if you want such a thing.)

Your mother's ring, and your mother's mother's, a paltry little thing worth more for the memory attached to it than the silver with which it was wrought.

He takes your memory and puts it on his smallest finger - you feel your mother slip her ties of blood and walk away and suddenly cannot think why the loss of her ever wrung your heart.

"Remember, three is a magical number, and the blood of the Fair Folk runs weak too far from the source."

"Yes," you say.

"Do you understand? I will weave you a future, but you must give me the pattern to work with."

"I understand," you say. "I have only enough magic for three nights. He must come to that conclusion himself."

"Good girl," he says. (Your heart swells, fills your chest, uncomfortably large - easily bruised. How easy you are to please.)

"Then I'll be free?"

"Our definitions of freedom are not the same," he says, "for we are very different creatures, you and I."

(No. No, you will never be free.)

The wheel turns and turns and the thread gleams gold.

* * *

"I have nothing else to give you," you say on the last night, the third night, which is far from true. You have the same currency every woman has. There would be blood too, and the shedding of blood always increases the worth of something, or so it sometimes seems.

If you were wise, you would offer, rather than let him ask - but you are young, a child who has never been in love but believes in it nonetheless, and you cannot bring yourself to.

You imagine all the things one of his kind might ask for. You imagine: the heart of your first true love in wooden box. _Your _heart, its break or its blood. Your memory. Your youth. Your twilight years. Your voice. Your hearing. Your sight. Your body is the least he could ask for. Yet you give him the choice.

He looks at you, his lips curling. Your name is cream in his mouth, but in the right dosages, everything is poison.

He leans close. "Give me your child," he breathes. You feel his words on your skin. "Your firstborn, male or female, it matters not, all I ask is that you give me your child."

"I - Yes," you say, soft and weak as a new kitten. "But - what if I have no child," you whisper, eyes on his throat to avoid his alien emerald eyes.

He holds your head in his hands, his palms soft (of course, he works with wool as you do) tilts your face to his. His eyes meet yours and devour you. They are glittering, gleaming, hungry in a way you do not know. (You think he wants you, and know it is half true.) "You will," he tells you, matter of fact.

(Your mother laboured and laboured to bring you forth; you were her third child as well as her first. But he says _you will _and there is no room for doubt.)

You suspect you have misunderstood (you hope you have misunderstood). "Will you make sure of that?" You ask, meaning to be arch and instead sounding only curious.

He laughs. You feel it in your bones. You think, wistfully: (If I had the choice) I would know you first. You think, sensibly: I have no choice. You think, wisely: there is much to fear from you.

"Your child," he repeats.

(You care more for your life than for a hypothetical child. Anybody would.) "Yes," you say, your voice a little stronger (live, you are going to live, and all it will take is something that may never come).

"Again," he says. "A third time I ask of you - will you give me your child in exchange for this night's work? Will you swear it?"

"I swear it," you say.

"Thrice asked, thrice agreed," he says, sits himself down and begins to spin.

You always were a fool.

* * *

You marry with gold straw woven into your dark hair, a harvest crown. Your hands smell of wood smoke from dragging your fingers through the cold ashes of your spinning wheel.

* * *

Your new husband calls you things like dear and darling and love, he calls you wife as if to remind himself.

You think he does not know your name. Even if he does, he will never caress the syllables, they will not flow from him like silk, like the mere existence of them is water to a parched throat.

(But in the dark of your wedding night - and it is your bridal bed you lie upon, though the candles make odd shadows and render everything even more alien than before - your name drips like honey from his tongue.

It does not hurt as much as you thought it would, as much as Greta said it would, bitter Greta who grew up so fast and sudden, yet you bite your lip and fill your mouth with blood, to have your name passed to you, cream mixing with copper.

The next night is different, but isn't that always the way?)

You wake to your husband snoring beside you, brow furrowed as if trying to remember something while trapped in dreams. You leave him there and seek the chambers set aside for you, neat and new, smelling of beeswax. You wash yourself with vinegar and watch a lonely dawn.

(_Give me your child_. The Fair Folk, the Shining Folk do not breed easily or well.) Nothing grows in vinegar, the old wives say_._

They hang the bloodstained sheet from the battlements like a trophy.

* * *

Your body betrays you, quickens and grows. You curse your fertility and wonder what holds your babe tight when you brothers and sisters could not stay within your mother long enough for more than tentative names.

(_Your firstborn, male or female, it matters not, all I ask is that you give me your child._)

You hate the crown you do not wear but can still feel upon your head. You hate the dresses, the way the velvet and brocade overwhelms you, you hate the maids and the way they watch your waist, you hate the sneers of the nobles, you hate that however much you bend and bow you know it is not good enough - your deportment is wrong, the way you eat, the way you talk, the way you walk, nothing you do is good enough - they are waiting for you to break.

You will not give them the satisfaction. You straighten your back, hold your name tight and stand alone, as you always have - always save for three nights.

You hate that you are learning cruelty.

(You love that you are learning cruelty.)

"Pretty thing," your husband calls you (but he does not say it quite right - give me your favour, my dear, my precious sweet thing.) "She's a pretty thing but like a hawk is pretty. Vicious when she wants to be, and deadly with the hood off. Lucky," he jokes, "that she is always hooded."

He prizes your cruelty; he calls it majesty - he thinks it means you match him, that he has found a born queen, all unknowing. He thinks other men envy him your lack of simpering, and maybe they do, but they find your cool regard far more unsettling.

You smile thinly (if you saw yourself in a polished glass you might recognise it) and let him think that you are blind, because you are, but you are learning to see more every day.

You do not hate your husband (you do not care enough to waste such emotion on him). This is good, is useful. If you hated, it would be so much harder to make him love you, and you are determined to make him love you, or at least see that you are useful. (You will keep his ledgers, his books, you can keep him rich instead of making him rich. It is a good deal. You ask for so little in return, after all, only his heart, his unused heart that will not know the difference between love and necessary affection).

"You are cruel, my pretty bird," he says, teasing, for he does not know the truth of his words. He thinks you are learning to love him (it does not occur to him that you are teaching him). He thinks the child in your belly makes you soft, makes your heart tender (the easier to divide into pieces and give away) when in fact it is the opposite. A faint heart serves no one - wins no maid, protects no babe.

You lower your lashes, murmur, "I am only what you have made of me."

Under your hand, the child you have already lost kicks and turns.

* * *

"Motherhood suits you," he says. "It becomes you."

You cradle your child, soft and warm and vulnerable, your child with her bright eyes. (How you laughed when first you saw her - a girl-child, he will not mind the loss of a girl-child so much - you did not know the weight of her in your arms, the pull of her at your breast would turn your stone-heart soft as the finest gold.)

"You owe me life," he says gently, reading your thoughts.

"Not hers."

"Yes, hers," he says. "You promised her to me. Thrice over you promised her to me."

"You asked that I give you a child." (I have, you do not say, cannot acknowledge what is as plain as the eyes in your daughter's face.)

"Tricky girl," he says, amused. "Don't try and play games of words with me, my dear."

Were his teeth always so sharp, so long?

"Please," you say, remember the avid way he watched your tears as if he would lick them from your face to taste your pain. You let them fall (weak, let him mistake your tears for weakness the way men do).

"Do you renege on our bargain," he says, voice turning cold, sharp, a dagger of ice in what was a summer day.

"No -" you say (yes, you say), thinking of your baby's eyes, bright and full of light. (You hate her, you love her - but she is _yours_ and that is all that matters.)

_"Elise_." Silk in his mouth. "Where is your courage, your strength? Do your dresses of velvet drown all that you were? What do you fear from me, I who helped you for nothing but a ring, a locket and your word?"

"I will give you -"

"Anything? My sweet, foolish girl, those are the words that brought us here."

"Gold, silver-"

"Straw?" He laughs.

"Please, ask again, anything, anything but my child,"

"My child," he corrects. "Mine, for you promised, you _swore_, and a bargain thrice made is not to be broken."

"You take from me the only thing that is mine."

"There will be other children."

"But I will know the loss of her. I do not want to replace her with other children! She cannot be replaced!"

"Shsh. Why do you fight so?"

"I want to keep my babe."

"Not for fear of what your husband will do when he finds the cradle empty? Have you learned to love him, Elise, do you fear his disappointment?"

You spit on the floor, peasant girl once more. "This child," you say. "This child is _mine_. I love her, I fight for her, for no reason other than she is mine."

"Good girl," he says, but your heart does not swell this time, can no longer be touched save by the restless daughter in your arms. "I will make you a deal."

"Name it," you say, helplessly. (Things circle, back to beginning the wheel has taken you.)

"Ah, but you just have. If you can call me by my true name in three nights time, you can keep the child."

(The Fair Folk do not have human names.)

* * *

Is he small? You think he is small, but perhaps he has shrunk in your memory to try and diminish his threat. You divide him into pieces, describe each as thoroughly as you can and hope they add up to a coherent whole. His eyes are bright, so bright. You would never mistake his eyes for human. His hair is black as a night, glossy as a raven's wing and fine as thistledown, his features sharp and wild.

Your messengers and spies look at you with uneasy indulgent smiles. The ones of common stock (your stock) look at you with pity, think your stumbling recollections are those of a girl in love, that memory and loss has crafted something ordinary into something extraordinary (they remember you had a life before this). You do not know what the noble born ones think (what your husband thinks when they tell him). You do not care.

"Find me his name," you say. "I will reward you."

Every single one of them remembers you have shining blood, that you can spin from straw gold that does not turn to chaff in the light of day (remember the spinning wheel is burnt but are wise enough to believe that the magic does not lie in the instrument).

Away they go, to every corner of the kingdom, bring back names that do not feel like anything but words in your mouth.

* * *

"That is not my name."

"That is not my name."

"That is not my name."

* * *

"My Queen, I found, I think, the man you seek."

"His name? Tell me his name!"

"My Queen, he sang while I watched, but in a language I did not know, though I am versed in a dozen or more tongues. My Queen, if his name was among those words I could not say it."

* * *

"What is your name," you say, your hand on his wrist, your voice a pleading whisper.

He laughs. Kisses you, his teeth sharp against your soft lips, and you do not flinch. "I applaud your cunning, but do not think you can win it from me with your body, however delightful. So let go, child, and keep your dignity."

"I have sent messengers to scour the length and breadth of the land. I have called upon wizards and witches and the simple ones who have dealings with your kind. I have learnt to read to know the census back and forth. I have told you all the names available to me, from ancient to modern, well-worn favourites and names I have made up. To each you have said, 'that is not my name'."

He holds your daughter in his arms, rocks her gently. She reaches for him with her tiny hands, the best of you, and the loss of her waits, like a chasm beneath your feet. "Take her if you must, then," you say, the words like poison.

"A child needs a mother," he says idly.

Your heart like a wizened peach pit in your hollow chest drops, faults, struggles to beat once more.

"Have you learned to love him, your husband, the man who would have killed you if you could not spin gold from straw?"

"He loves me," you say simply. Not proudly, though you have worked hard to make it so.

"You think that will keep you safe, peasant girl who can no longer spin?"

"Perhaps," you whisper, but your eyes are on your daughter's face.

"What ties you here?"

"I have no ties," you tell him. "None but my daughter. Don't you remember? I gave you the ties to my past and you cut them, but you did not give me the threads of my future to replace them. Just wove something out of them for me to tread on."

Your locket around his neck, your ring upon his hand, your child in his arms. (You think he wants you, and know it to be true.)

"Then Elise, my sweet Elise, do you remember what you asked me on the second night? I told you our definitions of freedom were very different, but they are not so different as that. Let me give you freedom now, the chance to choose as you will. In your tongue you might say my name is Rumpelstiltskin. Now that you may keep your daughter whatever your choice, come with me or stay as you please - but do as _you _please."

"Let me give you freedom from our bargain also," you say. "My name is Elfriede."

(Behind you, a kingdom of straw.)


End file.
